The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Certain software deployment products allow deployment and management of products through a single system. For example, a host product may take a plurality of other products, including binaries and configuration files, and install them onto host computing devices. The deployed products are generally managed by a single source. Thus, they can be packaged in a way that the deployment product understands, thereby allowing uniformity in the way they are deployed and managed.
However, some products deployed through the deployment products contain dependencies on additional software, such as open source software, which is not packaged in a manner that is readily understood by the deployment product. While this additional software may be important to the host computing devices, installing the additional software would generally require installing the software outside of the deployment product or manually configuring the software to be compatible with the deployment product. In either scenario, the convenience of the deployment products is lost when a host intends to install additional software.
Additionally, when software is installed through a deployment product, the ease of performing tests on the installation is greatly reduced due to the standardization of the tests for all deployed products. When software is installed outside of the deployment product, tests of the software's performance must also be manually installed. The added difficulty of finding and installing tests for each installed software package often leads to tests not being performed after a product has been installed, thus leading to improperly installed software.
Thus, there is a need for a system that repackages software received from disparate sources so that the software can be deployed through the same software deployment product.